Levity on a Snow Day

This has nothing to do with American literature per se, but if you'd like to see the weather forecast in Baltimore, you should have a watch. It is not a spoof -- but a real broadcast.

Paraphrasing + Connotation & Denotation

Since we are in the midst of a two-day snow break, I think it is most efficient to simply pass on to you some of most salient points of the lecture notes I would have imparted to you through in-class song and dance.

Paraphrasing Poetry
When summarizing a poem, you are answering the question: What does the poem say? In order to summarize you must paraphrase -- put the poem into your own words. Here are a few rules-of-thumb:

1. Restate the poem in simple, prose language
2. Include all main ideas covered by the poet
3. Translate all figurative language into literal language

Refer to the sample explication for "Nothing Gold Can Stay," and the notes on Emily Dickinson's "There is no frigate like a book" on page 38 in Sound and Sense.

Identifying the Narrator
Always assume the narrator is not the poet and you will be correct 99.9% of the time. Remember that poetry is almost always a form of fiction. Just as in novels and short stories, the narrator is very, very rarely the author himself.

Identifying the Central Purpose of a Poem
Ask yourself what is it the poet is try to accomplish (in general terms) through the writing of the poem. For example, is the poem's purpose:

- to tell a story?
- to reveal human character?
- to impart a vivid impression (e.g., a lovely spring morning)?
- to express an emotion (e.g., fear of death)?
- to convey an attitude or idea (e.g., war is an ugly affair)?

Aspects of Words
All words have three basic components, as follows:

1. Sound -- obviously, how the word sounds when it is pronounced
2. Denotation -- the dictionary definitions of a word
3. Connotation -- what the word suggests beyond definition

Denotation
Poets rely on the multiplicity of meanings of words

1. To give added meaning, using a word to mean more than one thing at a time
2. To achieve purposeful ambiguity

Connotation
Connotation is very important to the poet, and consequently he chooses his words carefully. In doing so, he can:

1. Concentrate or enrich the meaning of a sentence or idea
2. Say more in fewer words

Example
Consider the two words "childlike" and "childish." They both literally mean "characteristic of a child" but they have very different, even opposite connotations. "Childlike" makes us think of the positive attributes of a child like meekness, innocence, wide-eyed; while "childish" makes us think of the negative attributes of a child, like pettiness, ill-temper, selfishness, and immaturity.

Consider the difference in connations between "simple" and "simplistic."

Reminder: 5-minute quick quiz on Chapters 1-3 in Sound and Sense on Thursday.

Dickinson Poem for Explication

"Horse-drawn cabs" by Frederick Childe Hassam

Here is the second poem for February 11 explication (see Auden's poem in previous post):

Because I could not stop for Death
by Emily Dickinson

Allen Tate (1899-1979) -- a distinguished American poet, teacher, and critic -– once observed that "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" is an extraordinary poem. In fact, he said, it deserves to be regarded as "one of the greatest in the English language; it is flawless to the last detail."

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

Or rather, he passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,
My tippet only tulle.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

Tip: Consider that Dickenson's poem has characters, just as in a short story. We have the narrator, Death, Immortality, and the children.

Auden Poem for Explication

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s “The Census at Bethlehem"
-- referred to but unnamed in the first stanza
of Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts"

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s “Landscape with the Fall
of Icarus" -- mentioned in the second stanza
of Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts"

In case you don't have your Sound and Sense book, here is the first of the two poems you are explicating for Thursday, February 11:

Musée des Beaux Arts
by W.H. Auden

Background note: In December 1938, on a visit to Brussels, W.H. Auden went to the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique (The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium), which furnished the inspiration for this poem, published in 1940. It was a tense time in Belgium and the world. Madness was afoot in Europe, and many, including Auden, sensed the imminent outbreak of a great conflagration. The culture that had existed in Europe up to that moment would perish and a new one would be born. Some elements of the past would be salvaged, of course. Some aspects of European culture have a knack for surviving conflagrations. (read more here, and about Brueghel's paintings).

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Tip: Consider what the poem says about individual human suffering and the effect (or lack of effect) it has on others or on society. What might the poem suggest a religious acceptance of suffering?

Sample Poetry Explication

I am making available by PDF a sample poetry explication that provides an illustration of what I expect from your six poem explications that are due over the next three weeks. This explication pertains to "Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost:

Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Download the PDF explication

The Snowstorm

In honor of the snowstorm out the window, I am posting Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The Snowstorm" -- it is one of Larry's assigned poems. It is also one of four that do not appear in Sound and Sense.

But before the poem, an important announcement: Although there is no school today and although there may be no school tomorrow, your first two explications are due as scheduled on Thursday at 8:30 a.m. Please type them if possible. If you forgot to bring your poetry papers home, please note that the PDFs are available at the website. [ Assignments here and Explication here ] Read carefully through the "How to Write an Explication" hand-out. This explains how I expect the assignment to be completed. We will then discuss these two poems on Thursday. If you have any questions, please email me -- or use the comment box here.

Also, please remember you are responsible for reading Chapters 1-3 in Sound and Sense. We will still be having a "5-Minute Quiz" on this material on Thursday.

The Snowstorm
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hill and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet
Delated, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Come see the north wind's masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hiddden thorn;
Fills up the famer's lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer's sighs; and at the gate
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.

The Case For Memorizing Poetry

Jim Holt, author of Stop Me if You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes, wrote an essay that appeared in The New York Times last year that is worth reading.

Let's start with his myth-busting:

Myth No. 1: Poetry is painful to memorize.
It is not at all painful. Just do a line or two a day.

Myth No. 2: There isn’t enough room in your memory to store a lot of poetry.
Bad analogy. Memory is a muscle, not a quart jar.

Myth No. 3: Everyone needs an iPod.
You do not need an iPod. Memorize poetry instead.

...and here are a few excerpts from his essay "Got Poetry":

A few years ago, I started learning poetry by heart on a daily basis. I’ve now memorized about a hundred poems, some of them quite long — more than 2,000 lines in all, not including limericks and Bob Dylan lyrics. I recite them to myself while jogging along the Hudson River, quite loudly if no other joggers are within earshot. I do the same, but more quietly, while walking around Manhattan on errands — just another guy on an invisible cellphone...

A few lucky types seem to memorize great swaths of poetry without even trying. George Orwell said that when a verse passage “has really rung the bell” — as the early T. S. Eliot invariably did for him — he could remember 20 or 30 lines after a single reading. Samuel Johnson, according to Boswell, had a similar mnemonic gift. Christopher Hitchens — who carries around in his head a small anthology of verse, all of which, as his friend Ian McEwan says, is “instantly neurologically available” — also seems to absorb poems by osmosis. (Or maybe he swots them up late at night after his dinner-party guests have all passed out.) Richard Howard once told me that he eased into the memorization habit as a child, when his parents rewarded him with a dime for each poem he learned.

For the rest of us, the key to memorizing a poem painlessly is to do it incrementally, in tiny bits. I knock a couple of new lines into my head each morning before breakfast, hooking them onto what I’ve already got. At the moment, I’m 22 lines into Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” with 48 lines to go. It will take me about a month to learn the whole thing at this leisurely pace, but in the end I’ll be the possessor of a nice big piece of poetical real estate, one that I will always be able to revisit and roam about in.

The process of memorizing a poem is fairly mechanical at first. You cling to the meter and rhyme scheme (if there is one), declaiming the lines in a sort of sing-songy way without worrying too much about what they mean. But then something organic starts to happen. Mere memorization gives way to performance. You begin to feel the tension between the abstract meter of the poem — the “duh DA duh DA duh DA duh DA duh DA” of iambic pentameter, say — and the rhythms arising from the actual sense of the words. (Part of the genius of Yeats or Pope is the way they intensify meaning by bucking against the meter.) It’s a physical feeling, and it’s a deeply pleasurable one. You can get something like it by reading the poem out loud off the page, but the sensation is far more powerful when the words come from within. (The act of reading tends to spoil physical pleasure.) It’s the difference between sight-reading a Beethoven piano sonata and playing it from memory — doing the latter, you somehow feel you come closer to channeling the composer’s emotions. And with poetry you don’t need a piano.

Read the whole article...

Multiplicity of meanings in poetry

Dead Sea coastline

Connotation and denotation are both important for the poet -- and important to understand for the read who seeks to understand and appreciate poetry. Connotation is what a word suggests beyond its dictionary definition. For example, "home" by connotation suggests something different that "abode." When we hear home, we think: security, love, comfort, family.

Denotation is just as important as connotation, especially considering the multiplicity of meanings of so many words. As the authors of Sound and Sense write, "The ambiguity and multiplicity of meanings possessed by words are an obstacle to the scientist but a resource to the poet" (42). Consider the word dead. We know it means something that is not alive. True, but it means a whole lot more. How many senses (different definitions) can you think of pertaining to "dead"?

Dictionary.com identifies 40 definitions (senses) for the word dead:

1. no longer living; deprived of life.
2. brain-dead.
3. not endowed with life; inanimate
4. resembling death; deathlike
5. bereft of sensation; numb
6. lacking sensitivity of feeling; insensitive
7. incapable of being emotionally moved; unresponsive
8. (of an emotion) no longer felt; ended; extinguished
9. no longer current or prevalent, obsolete
10. no longer functioning, operating, or productive
11. not moving or circulating; stagnant; stale
12. utterly tired; exhausted
13. (of a language) no longer in use
14. without vitality, spirit, enthusiasm, or the like
15. lacking the customary activity; dull; inactive
16. complete; absolute: dead silence
17. sudden or abrupt, as the complete stoppage of an action
18. put out; extinguished
19. without resilience or bounce
20. infertile; barren
21. exact; precise
22. accurate; sure; unerring
23. direct; straight
24. tasteless or flat, as a beverage
25. flat rather than glossy, bright, or brilliant
26. without resonance; anechoic
27. not fruitful; unproductive
28. deprived of civil rights
29. Sports. out of play
30. (of a golf ball) lying so close to the hole...
31. (of type or copy) having been used or rejected
32. Electricity. free from any electric connection
33. Metallurgy. (of steel) fully killed, unresponsive to heat treatment.
34. (of the mouth of a horse) no longer sensitive to the pressure of a bit.
35. noting any rope in a tackle that does not pass over a pulley
36. the period of greatest darkness, coldness
37. the dead, dead persons collectively
38. absolutely; completely: dead right; dead tired
39. with sudden and total stoppage of motion
40. directly; exactly; straight: dead ahead

Challenge: Can you find a word that has more than 42 senses? If so, pray tell.

Voyage of the Pequod

If you're wondering where the Pequod sailed, here's a splendid map showing the voyage: from New Bedford, Massachusetts down to the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa, and east into the Indian Ocean and then into the South Pacific where fate awaits.

And here is how Ishmael describes the Pequod in Chapter 16:

You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I know;- square-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box galliots, and what not; but take my word for it, you never saw such a rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod. She was a ship of the old school, rather small if anything; with an old-fashioned claw-footed look about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull's complexion was darkened like a French grenadier's, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her venerable bows looked bearded. Her masts- cut somewhere on the coast of Japan, where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale- her masts stood stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Becket bled. But to all these her old antiquities, were added new and marvellous features, pertaining to the wild business that for more than half a century she had followed. Old Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded another vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one of the principal owners of the Pequod,- this old Peleg, during the term of his chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over, with a quaintness both of material and device, unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake's carved buckler or bedstead. She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to. Those thews ran not through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a tiller; and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe. The helmsman who steered that tiller in a tempest, felt like the Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw. A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.

Word of the Day: Skylarking

Today's "word of the day" is a fanciful nautical term from Moby Dick:

Skylarking: 1. Originally described the antics of young Navymen who climbed and slid down the backstays for fun. Since the ancient word "lac" means "to play" and the games started high in the masts, the term was originally "skylacing." Later, corruption of the word changed it to "skylarking"; 2. Navy-speak for goofing off.

Other nautical terms used in Moby Dick:

aft: towards the stern (rear) of the vessel

ballast: any dense heavy material, such as lead or iron pigs, used to stabilize a vessel, esp one that is not carrying cargo

boom: a spar attached to the foot of a fore-and-aft sail

bulkhead: an upright wall within the hull of a ship. Particularly a watertight, load-bearing wall

bulwarks: the extension of the ship's side above the level of the weather deck.

cleat: a stationary device used to secure a rope aboard a vessel

gaff: a hook on a long pole to haul fish in

gunwale: upper edge of the hull

halyard: a line or rope used to raise the head of any sail

hawser: large rope used for mooring or towing a vessel

helmsman: a person who steers a ship

hull: the shell and framework of the basic flotation-oriented part of a ship

jib: a triangular staysail at the front of a ship

league: unit of length, normally equal to three nautical miles

luff: the forward edge of a sail

reef: to temporarily reduce the area of a sail exposed to the wind, usually to guard against adverse effects of strong wind or to slow the vessel

scuttle: a small opening, or lid thereof, in a ship's deck or hull

spar: A wooden or iron pole used to support various pieces of rigging and sails

stern: the rear part of a ship, technically defined as the area built up over the sternpost

tiller: a lever used for steering, attached to the top of the rudder post. Used mainly on smaller vessels, such as dinghies and rowing boats

yaw: A vessel's rotational motion about the vertical axis, causing the fore and aft ends to swing from side to side repetitively

Moby Dick: What's In a Name?

You may have noticed, but the the crew-members of the Pequod all have carefully-chosen character names:

Ishmael: The name has come to symbolize orphans, exiles, and social outcasts — in the opening paragraph of Moby Dick, Ishmael tells us he has turned to the sea out of a feeling of alienation from human society.

Elijah: Issues the prophetic warning before Ishmael sails on the Pequod; named for the Biblical prophet, Elijah. Famous line: "A soul's a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon."

Ahab: See 1 Kings 16:28. Introduced as "a grand, ungodly, godlike man," Ahab is the monomaniacal one-legged captain of the Pequod Although he's a Quaker, he seeks revenge on the whale in defiance of his religion's pacifism. He is our tragic hero: great heart and tragic flaw.

Consider what the significance (symbolically) might be of some of the others: Gabriel, Prometheus (nickname for Perth), Pip, Starbuck, Queequeg (the "cannibal"), etc.

NB. The screenplay for Moby Dick was written by Ray Bradbury!

J.D. Salinger dies at age 91

J.D. Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye, Franny & Zooey among other stories, died on Thursday at the age of 91. I know several of you have read both Catcher in the Rye and Franny & Zooey, but you should all become familiar with the name J.D. Salinger, one of the most talked about American authors of 20th century literature. Salinger stopped publishing his writing in the early 1960's and little is known about his personal life.

The following is not a standard obituary, but rather a blog explanation of how J.D. Salinger was responsible for one man becoming a Catholic:

J.D. Salinger died yesterday at the age of 91 and, full disclosure, I’ve never read The Catcher in the Rye. Nor have I bothered getting detailed autobiographical information on Mr. Salinger. I can only say that his work had an effect on my prayer life, thus proving once again, to me anyway, that God continues to work through the secular in unexpected ways.

I was a new Catholic, and interested in deepening my prayer life. I was reading a book on contemplative prayer, Into the Silent Land by Martin Laird. The author mentioned Salinger’s novel Franny and Zooey. F&Z is another of Salinger’s novels that documents the triumphs and travails of the Glass family. Published as short stories in The New Yorker (Franny in 1955 and Zooey in 1957), then put together as one, the book was published in 1961.

If you want a synopsis of this novel, you can easily find many. All I can say is that through Laird, I first learned of The Jesus Prayer, and through Salinger I saw an application of its use and received another lead to a great book which truly had the impact on my prayer life that I was seeking: The Way of the Pilgrim.

Salinger is an enigma to us today and has been for over 40 years. He “dropped out,” fled the world. He was a recluse whom the world didn’t seem to understand. Why did you flee? You had it all J.D.! Why did you not take advantage of your gift? Why did you stop sharing it with us? These seem to me to be much the same circumstances that inspired the Desert Fathers and Mothers to flee the world as well. Perhaps, like them, J.D. figured the world out and decided to become a hermit.

In the past, this kind of behavior was understood to be rational for holy men and women. In the East, it is more appreciated and understood. In the West, it is cause for consternation, contempt, and a judgment by society that you are not a good steward of your talents...

Continuing reading the post...

The Age of Innocence -- BBC Radio Drama

BBC Radio 7 is presenting The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton in a radio drama format. BBC Radio usually produces excellent radio plays You can listen by following this link. The Age of Innocence is the novel Jennifer presented. Wharton will be the next novelist we're reading in class. The novel: Ethan Frome.

The Dakota: 1 W 72nd St, New York City

Julianna mentioned in her presentation today that part of Jack Finney's Time and Again is set at the Dakota apartment building on Central Park West. The Dakota is arguably the most famous apartment building in the country. Many famous performers, including John Lennon, lived there. Lennon was shot dead outside the building by a crazed fan in 1980. The Dakota is also one of the most expensive. According to the real estate website, these are average costs of the condos there:

4 Bedrooms from $18,500,000
3 Bedrooms from $14,500,000
1 Bedroom from $5,900,000

(For sake of comparison, you could buy 10-room mansion with all amenities on a 10-acre lot for under $5.9 million in Cincinnati.)

Here are some excerpts from an article describing the Dakota:

The city's most legendary apartment building, the Dakota is a massive fortress-like structure with a large center courtyard and very large apartments with very high ceilings.

With an impressive, arched entrance with sentry box flanked by large planters, the buff-colored building is surrounded by a very attractive and dramatic low cast-iron fence in front of a "dry moat." The four corners of the courtyard, which has a fountain, lead to separate lobbies and passenger elevators. (Service elevators run up the middle of each side of the building.)

The building exudes solidity as well it should since its bottom walls are 28 inches thick, but its profusion of architectural elements and pale yellow brickwork that contrasts with dark brown masonry at the corners produce a lively and graceful appearance of considerable visual interest because of the mix of gables, arches, balconies, oriel windows, dormers, finials and other ornamentation including a flagpole at the top of its park facade.


When it was built in 1884, it towered over the Upper West Side and was an immediate success with all its apartments rented on opening day. Its developer, Edward Severin Clark, an heir to a sewing machine fortune, died two years before it opened. The building's name allegedly reflected the fact that the building was so far removed from the city's established luxury residential areas that it might as well be in the Dakota territory. Its 72nd Street façade, indeed, has an image of a Native American carved on its façade.

Designed by Henry J. Hardenbergh, who would later design the Plaza Hotel, the building had tennis courts and a croquet field on the adjoining 175-foot-long lot on West 72nd Street that was later developed after World War II as a separate apartment building.

Many of residents of its cooperative apartments have been celebrities including John Lennon, the Beatle who was shot outside the building in 1980, Leonard Bernstein, the composer and conductor, Lauren Bacall, the actress, Judy Garland, the singer, William Inge, the playwright, Jo Mielziner, the stage designer, Rex Reed, the columnist.

The 93-unit building's Victorian and Gothic architectural details and ambiance were featured in the popular spooky movie, "Rosemary's Baby," but it is famed more now for its spectacular apartments.

The Dakota is also ranked as New York City’s #7 Most Haunted Place. Many eerie stories are linked with 1 West 72nd Street. In the 60's, the construction workers were said to have seen a ghost of a young boy dressed in a way outdated outfit. And, needless to say, John Lennon was murdered while exiting the front door—some believe that his ghost also visits it from time to time.

Word of the Day: Dun

I noticed that half the class not only missed #37 on the vocabulary test, but those who missed it insisted that the answer was not in the list of choices from which to choose. The word is "dun" and is used in "Bartleby the Scrivener" in the following sentence, when the narrator is commenting upon the mysterious gents who pay visits to Nippers:

I have good reason to believe, however, that one individual who called upon him at my chambers, and who, with a grand air, he insisted was his client, was no other than a dun, and the alleged title-deed, a bill.

Many of you wrote in the little space for the answer: "dullish brown." Now, I ask you: Does "dullish brown" fit in for "dun" in the above sentence? Did Nippers have mysterious dull-brown men stalking him? Uh, no.

So what is "dun"?

Dun: (v) to importune a debtor for payment; to make repeated and insistent demands, especially concerning an overdue payment; (n) one who duns.

So, in the above statement about Nippers, the reader should understand that the man who visited the office was a creditor coming to collect a payment for a debt.

Yes, dun does has another meaning. It is a kind of horse of a dullish brown color. But again, Nippers was visited by a creditor, not a horse.

Term Paper: Important Dates

Here are some important dates regarding the 3-Book Term Paper project. I advise that you refresh your memory as to the scope and focus of this project. It is easy to lose sight of the primary goals when completing a project over multiple quarters. Please refer to the handout "Three-Books Project Info," which is available here in PDF format. And now the dates:

Third Quarter
Monday, Feb. 15: 2nd Book Data Sheet due
Monday, March 8: 3rd Book Data Sheet due
Thursday, March 11: Guiding Question & Working Thesis Statement due

Fourth Quarter
Monday, March 29: Thesis Statement + Note Cards due
Thursday, April 15: Final Outline due
Thursday, April 22: Final Research Paper due in MLA format

N.B. This is a tentative schedule and subject to change, but none of the due dates will be changed to earlier dates than appear here. In March you will be given a full research packet, which will include all specifications for research, note-taking, and writing. Classes from April 12-21 will be dedicated to completing the outline and final research paper.

Shape Poetry, Concrete Poetry

When we finish with our unit on Herman Melville, we will be moving on to poetry for a while as you continue to read your three books for the term paper assignment. Since Penelope asked today about poems that take the shape of their subject, I thought I'd provide a few examples. As far as I can tell, there's no other name for this style of gimmick poetry other than "shape poetry" or "concrete poetry." This is defined as a poem in which the typographical arrangement of words on the page is as important in conveying the intended effect as the conventional elements of the poem, such as meaning of words, rhythm, rhyme and so on.

In the examples above, the male poem is intended to resemble a dumbbell, and the female poem is intended to resemble an hourglass. What can you come up with?

Word of the day: Puddinghead

Pudding head (puddenhead, pudd'nhead): a person who is not very bright; dolt, dullard, pillock, poor fish, stupe, berk, blockhead, bonehead, dunce, dunderhead, hammerhead, knucklehead, loggerhead, lunkhead, muttonhead, numskull, nitwit

Many historians believe that the term “pudding head” came from the American colonial belief that if children learning to walk fell frequently and hit their heads, they could scramble their brains, making them like the consistency of pudding, thereby becoming “pudding heads.” In Colonial Williamsburg’s Children’s glossary, it adds that toddlers were often and lovingly referred to as “little pudding heads."

Some children, in fact wore pudding caps to prevent them from becoming pudding heads!

pudding cap in Australia

A pudding cap is a stuffed roll placed on a toddler’s head and tied in the back. It was worn for the same reason children today wear helmets — to protect the brain from damage in a fall.

In several Flemish and Dutch paintings of the early 17th century toddlers of the 1620-30’s are depicted wearing their pudding caps. A drawing by Pieter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) shows a toddler wearing one that is a sausage shaped padded roll of fabric, tied at the back of the head. There is one narrow ribbon stretched across the top of the head (from side to side, not front to back) and continues as ties under the chin. There is a linen cap under the pudding cap.

There's even a movement in Australia to require all children in day care to wear a pudding cap. Don't believe it? Read here.

You may have noted the irony in Pudd'nhead Wilson: though our eponymous character is given the nickname of a dunce because of his initial "half-dog" comment (and his subsequent obsession with collecting fingerprints), he turns out to be among the smarter folk of his day, at least when it comes time to defending the innocent.

3-Book Term Presentation Order

The presentations will be given in chronological order, from oldest book to newest. You should be prepared to take good notes and ask intelligent questions, because you will be quizzed on the material presented. Here's how the order shapes up:

Larry
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain(1889)

Elizabeth
Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain (1894)

Mike
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)

Marcella
My Antonia by Willa Cather (1918)

Jennifer
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton(1920)

Joseph
Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo(1939)

Olivia
The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison(1952)

Annmarie
The Outsider by Richard Wright(1953)

Naomi
A Separate Peace by John Knowles(1959)

Gabriela
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee(1960)

Ashley
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller(1961)

Peter
Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck(1962)

Sean
The Chosen by Chaim Potok(1967)

Julianna
Time and Again by Jack Finney(1970)

Other New York City Stories & Authors

Washington Square Park, Triumphal Arch

Despite the facts that "Bartleby the Scrivener" was set in Manhattan and that Melville has a close connection to New York City himself, he is not generally regarded as a New York City author. The Realists (post-1865) who came after the days of Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe, were more apt to use New York City as a setting for their novels and short stories -- telling of the lives of the upper crust of society as well as the immigrant poor. So, who are the New York City realists who followed Melville?

Edith Wharton is probably the most prolific and well-regarded of them. Several of her novels are set in New York City -- Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, and Old New York; Stephen Crane's Maggie of the Streets, Henry James' Washington Square, and John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer are others. Although Willa Cather is best known for her prairie novels and short stories, she set several of her stories (e.g., "Paul's Case" and "Neighbour Rosicky") at least partially in New York City, usually in order to contrast big town lifestyles with small town attitudes.

This semester we will next be getting into the realm of realism by reading Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, and Willa Cather, although not their New York stories.